Month: October 2016

Inceptions suffer from the same problems that affect long meetings full of people:

Having a lot of people in a room like your stakeholders, your team, your boss and your boss’s boss means only one thing: long discussions about opinions and points of view, without real hard data to back those opinions, which make discussions even longer. This of course means you can’t obtain much value for your product after these discussions.

It’s normal to also have people connected via video-conference like Skype or Google Hangouts. It’s 2016 but we still have issues with these types of virtual meetings, specially with internet connections not being as good as they should be. This means you’ll probably have to repeat something many times in order for everyone on the other side of the screen to understand what you’re trying to communicate.

Since there are so many people invited to this event, there’s probably more than one that will be late and you’ll have to do a summary of what has been discussed up to that point, only for that person, but wasting everyone else’s time.

The Inceptions I’ve been to have lasted 5 consecutive days. 5 days! 5 days, with at least 10 people in the room, for 8 hours a day… that’s 400 hours of engineers, designers, project managers and executives. Are you sure you need that much capacity in order to know what product to build and set your initial backlog? Do you really need these really expensive 400 hours?